My kids are not a 'human product' for a Common Core assembly line

By Melissa Smith
for The News-Sentinel

Thursday, October 10, 2013 - 12:01 am

AN OPEN LETTER TO REP. KATHY HEUER

I’m telling you, Kathy, this time it’s going to take more than a glossy head shot on a district-wide mailer to get my vote. You had your chance to put the brakes on Common Core, and you blew it! You are one of only a handful of representatives who voted against the statewide pause in Common Core.

Could it be that the Chamber of Commerce, a leading supporter of Common Core, is one of your largest campaign contributors? We don’t need yet another politician doing the bidding of big-business interests. This isn’t the Chamber of Commerce of yesteryear standing up for small business and Main Street. This is the “new and improved” Chamber that wholeheartedly endorses the training of our Indiana children as “human products for the global workforce.”

My kids are not a “human product” to be manufactured in a Common Core assembly line for some elitist corporatists. American education should not be for sale to private interests with pitiful track records on education that have never delivered on hollow promises of “higher standards” or increased student readiness.

So it makes me wonder, Kathy; you’re a mom just like me. Why have you sold out Hoosier students to the Common Core special interests? I would think that an experienced mother would have better judgment and more sense, putting what’s best for children first. You got rolled by an educational syndicate.

Common Core turns control of our Indiana schools over to Washington bureaucrats sending our teachers and children straight into the arms of a copyrighted curriculum with little local wiggle room. Why would you think that a bureaucracy that can’t run the Post Office efficiently could run our educational system with any greater insight?

Under Common Core, our students lose their individuality, classroom teachers lose flexibility and parents get no voice at all. When an elementary child needs remediation, when a parent doesn’t approve of the soft-core porn reading selection in the 11th grade “literature” class, when the classroom teacher wants to inspire and enrich our gifted thinkers, who ya gonna call? That’s right, Kathy. We’re not going to call you, or our local school district or even someone in Indiana at all. We’re going to get schlepped off to D.C., where some under-motivated pencil pusher will tell us to “have a good day, now.”

Apparently, it’s either one of two things. You either didn’t do your homework, or you’re willing to sell out a whole generation and generations yet to come to a dumbed-down curriculum that doesn’t even teach kids to read and write cursive anymore.

It makes me sad. I’m sad for the kids in my neighborhood who will never know the beauty of Shakespeare because it was more important to read “informational texts” like EPA guidelines and standards. I’m sad for the kids in my neighborhood who will always think that understanding a mathematical “process” is more important than getting an accurate answer. I wouldn’t want to ride in the car that those kids are going to engineer!

And it makes me sad, Kathy, for the parents in my neighborhood who thought that you had their back on education. I probably sound snippy, but the time for playing nice is over. Mama grizzlies aren’t nice when someone gets between their cubs and the future.

It’s not too late to distinguish yourself. The next weeks and months are going to be huge. If you fold on education, we risk having our children become dumbed-down automatons in the globalist machine. If you think it’s more important to be part of the insider network, then join the country club – and let someone else represent the voice of this district’s children and parents.